Kushiel's Mercy (Imriel's Trilogy, #3)

by Jacqueline Carey

But there is a difference between loving and being in love—that maddening passion that expands the heart and exalts the soul, that shakes the heavens and roils the depths of hell.

I knew there was a dark fire in her depths that fed my own desires. I didn’t know about the aching abyss of tenderness and yearning that would open between us, unassuaged by time or distance. Nor, I daresay, did she. We discovered it together.

“Then I stand beside you.” I kneed the Bastard. My speckled horse snorted and pranced, jostling alongside Sidonie’s palfrey. I reached out to lay my hand over hers briefly. “Always. For as long as you will have me, and longer, I will stand at your side.” She squeezed my hand. “I know.”

I turned the gold ring on my finger. Despite everything, the love I felt for her was undiminished. The soaring exaltation, the inexplicable rightness of the fit. The shared laughter and talk, the common, ordinary happiness. And somewhere beneath it, a sense that this was important and needful. I couldn’t explain it. I only knew it was true.

“At its best . . . at its best, Terre d’Ange has a great deal to teach the world about the nature of love and how we might best live our lives.” Her voice grew stronger. “And I do not think I would ever have understood that if I had not fallen in love with the one person in the world it was not proper to love.”

“Generations of incest,” Mavros said cheerfully, approaching us with our cousin Roshana beside him. “At least on House Shahrizai’s side. Nice to see you’re carrying on the tradition.” “I’m glad you’re pleased,” I said.

“May Blessed Elua and his Companions have mercy on me, I do trust you. As I love you, I trust you.” I slid my hands up her warm, silk-covered back. “Promise?” “Yes.” Sidonie kissed me. “I do. Irrationally, maddeningly, utterly.” “Always?” I whispered. “Always and always.” She kissed me again, her tongue darting between my lips, then sat back on her heels to regard me, a complicated mixture of sorrow and love in her dark eyes. “I promise.”

It had been this way between us since the beginning, and neither of us could say why. The desire between us was like an oil-soaked rag, ready to ignite at a single spark. And yet it was more than that, too. We reflected one another, the bright mirror and the dark.

Whatever the nature of the fire Blessed Elua had lit between us, it continued to burn unabated. It had survived time, distance, enchantment, and grief, and it survived familiarity, too. There was an invisible cord binding us together. In the midst of a crowded room, I always knew where she was. If I closed my eyes and listened hard, I could almost feel her heart beating, drawing mine as inexorably as a lodestone draws iron.

In the Night Court, there were elaborate contracts spelling out what was or was not permitted during the course of an assignation. That was part of what I wanted her to see and understand. Still, in the end, the essence of the exchange was trust, the surrender and acceptance of it. The more complete the surrender, the more wholehearted the acceptance, the more powerful the exchange.

In Tiberium, a Priest of Asclepius had told me to learn to bear them with pride. Even a stunted tree reaches for sunlight, he’d said. I’d found mine. And I didn’t want to leave her.

“You are my sunlight, Sidonie. The sun in my sky and the moon in my heavens. All that’s bright and good in my life.” I smiled. “And a little bit that’s dark, too.”

“Knowledge is power. And yet power corrupts. Not all who wield it, but most. Still, I had a hunger for knowledge. And so I decided long ago that I would seek it out. That I would gather and amass it, and assign myself the greatest challenge of all: to wield it seldom or never in the service of my own desires.”

“Happiness,” he said. I took a long drink of my wine. “Happiness, my lord?” “It is the highest form of wisdom.”

I entered the courtyard. I saw her. Phèdre was right. My mother’s beauty hadn’t dimmed. It had only changed again. Melisande lifted her head and gazed at me, tears brightening her glorious eyes, the deep blue hue of a twilit sea. There were faint lines etched at the corners, a few threads of bright silver strewn in her black hair. There was somewhat else, too. A well of sorrow and regret, a humanity that had been lacking. A goddess rendered mortal by time and compassion, all the more poignant for it.

“You’re a good man,” Melisande murmured. “Elua knows, if I did one good thing in my life, it was binding myself to a promise to allow you to be raised by Phèdre nó Delaunay and that damned Cassiline of hers.” “The only gift I would accept from you,” I said, remembering what Phèdre had told me. “I thank you for it.”

My mother escorted me to the courtyard herself. In the twilight, her beauty deepened. I thought about her likeness hanging in the Hall of Portraits at the Palace. In her youth, she’d had a beauty as keen and as deadly as a blade. Now, oddly, it cut deeper. Sorrow became her.

“What fault-lines do you see in me?” My mother looked at me for a long, long time. The mantle of sorrow settled back over her. “Many,” she said at length, her voice gentle. “Fault-lines of grief and loss and despair, and fault-lines of pride and yearning. A strong, bright vein of indomitable courage and strength that with the wisdom of experience, even I would be reluctant to cross.”

“What’s it like?” he asked. “Being in love.” “It’s awful.” I smiled. “And wonderful. Betimes you feel like your heart’s going to burst into a thousand pieces, flaying your chest wide open. Betimes you feel like you could leap off a cliff and take wing. And then it changes. It puts roots into you, deep and enduring. It becomes a part of you.”

Irony piled on irony. I’d travelled to the far ends of the earth with Phèdre and Joscelin to find the Name of God, a word capable of binding an angel. Now it seemed I sought a word that would loose a demon from its bindings. The bright mirror and the dark reflected one another: good and evil, the sacred and profane.

Happiness is the highest form of wisdom.”

I wanted to say to her, It’s not a game; it’s in deadly earnest. But Sidonie knew. I didn’t need to hear her say it. I saw her, saw all of her. The raised chin and the firm, demanding brows, at odds with the delicate bones of her face. All the pride and determination, all the rising fury and suspicion, terror and vulnerability. A measure of trust I hadn’t earned. Fault-lines created through cruel artifice. It made my heart ache and my throat tighten. I loved her.

“Then I will see you in New Carthage,” she murmured. What I wanted to say was I will follow you to the ends of the earth. I will be whatever you ask of me: courtier, savior, lover, and husband, master and slave. Anything, everything. Only ask. What I said was, “Yes.”

I wished I could travel backward through time to address those childhood selves. To tell Sidonie that one day she would defy her mother and half the nation for the sake of this proud, wounded boy whom she regarded with such misgivings, that he would grow into a man she trusted beyond all reason. To tell my young self that this cool, haughty girl who galled him so would one day be the most precious thing in the world to him, that she would become a woman for whom he would willingly lay down his life.

There’s nothing that lies between the two of us that frightens me, Imriel. We defied Blessed Elua’s precept and others paid the price for it. We have to live with that, you and I. If we survive this, I think we might at least reckon ourselves forgiven in part.”

“I don’t think things will ever be the same. They can’t be. But we’ve survived. We’ll grieve. We’ll heal. We’ll remember that there’s laughter and joy and love and desire in the world. Enough to drive out the grief and sorrow. Enough to banish guilt and shame.”

We gave them the story as a gift. Its origins reached back into the past. A traitoress had given birth to a boy raised to believe himself a goat-herding orphan; two heroes of the realm had rescued a stolen boy and taught him to be good. The rulers of two nations had given birth to two girls and instilled ideals of valor and justice in them. And it reached back farther into the tales of those who had shaped them: Anafiel Delaunay, Phèdre’s mentor and patron. A grandfather I’d never known whose vicious charm had shaped my mother’s youth. On and on it spiraled, backward into the mists of time. But it would go forward, too. I thought of the words I’d spoken to the injured young noblewoman today. The story would go on and on. One day, Sidonie’s and my great-grandchildren would stand in the Hall of Portraits, holding their own children’s hands. They would point to our likenesses and tell our story. These were your great-great-grandparents . . . And they would live tales of their own, spinning it ever farther into the future. On and on without end.

I embraced them all—I, who had once been a damaged, brooding boy reluctant to be touched. I took them into my heart and held them there. And through it all, I felt the lingering echo of the presence of Blessed Elua and his Companions—a promise of hope, a promise of healing, a promise of happiness. And always, I felt Sidonie’s presence, as sure and unfailing as sunlight, her heart bound to mine by a golden cord.

“So.” Ysandre broke the long, long silence. Her violet eyes were bemused. “Terre d’Ange owes its freedom to Melisande Shahrizai?” I nodded wearily. “In a sense.” Joscelin shook his head. “The humors of the gods are perverse.” “Yes.” Phèdre’s gaze rested on us, on Sidonie and me. “But in the end, they are merciful.”

Sidonie reached up to kiss me, and there were no murmurs of disapproval from the slowly dispersing crowd, no underlying current of suspicion, only quiet smiles and nods. The fact that we were together had become emblematic of the fact that all was well in Terre d’Ange. Our love had been woven into the fabric of the realm.

So many sacrifices, great and small. Had they been needful to bring us to this moment? I would never know. All I could do was mourn and honor them, great and small.

Private griefs, private shames. There were some we could never share with one another, not wholly. But that was all right, too. We knew one another. We bore our scars and carried our memories as best we could.

I watched Mavros flirt unabashedly with an amused Lucius, and decided that Master Piero’s best pupil could hold his own against my obstreperous cousin.

There was the shadow of sorrow, yes. It would always be there. But that was the nature of life. The bright mirror and the dark, reflecting one another. And today there was so much brightness.

Phèdre and Joscelin. “Thank you,” I said to them. “Just . . . thank you.” For the gift of my life, for the gift of all that I was. For everything. I owed them everything. I always would.

Happiness is the highest form of wisdom.

Twilight into dusk, dusk into night. The revels continued. The musicians played, tireless. We danced, trampling the greensward. I could not count my partners. I only knew, as the sky began to lighten in the east, that the last one was the one that mattered. I held Sidonie in my arms. The prophecy an old Priest of Elua had spoken for me so many years ago had proved true. I had found love and lost it, over and over again. This time I meant to keep it.

“Nothing and no one will ever come between us again.” She kissed me back. “Do you promise it?” The crowd swirled around us, pelting us with petals, laughing and shouting, offering traditional blessings and bawdy jests. Love. It was all done in love. I gazed at Sidonie, at the mixture of love and desire and perfect trust in her black eyes, rose petals caught in her hair. My unlikeliest of loves, found in the last place I would ever have thought to look. My sunlight. My heart swelled, my happiness feeling too vast for my body to contain. I felt the touch of divine grace brush us both like a mighty unseen wing, setting somewhat deep inside me to quivering, filling me with brightness. It felt like a promise. “Always,” I said. “Always and always.”